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Kenneth Boulding never knew any boundaries: born in Liverpool, he ascended class prejudice to a distinguished undergraduate career at Oxford - publishing his first paper (1932) while still there. Not bothering to pick up his B. Litt., Boulding proceeded to America. A meeting with Schumpeter on the transatlantic crossing led him to spend some time at Harvard before proceeding on to Chicago - where, under the influence of both Knight and Schultz he wrote a series of other papers on capital theory (pro-Knight, contra Austrians). Not bothering to pick up a Ph.D., Boulding went off to Scotland as an assitant lecturer at Edinburgh. In 1937, Boulding crossed back over to America, to Colgate this time, where he wrote his monumental two-volume textbook, Economic Analysis - the epitome of the Neoclassical- Keynesian Synthesis - before proceeding on to roam around the country: to work for the League of Nations at Princeton, at Fisk University in Tennessee, Iowa State College at Ames (where he wrote his famous 1944 paper on liquidity preference and his 1950 Reconstruction of Economics on stock-flow distinctions), University of Michigan (where he set up his "Center for Research in Conflict Resolution") - with intermediary stays at Stanford (where he set up the famous "Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences") and the International Christian University in Japan (from whence arose his first work on "evolutionary" economics (1970)) - before finally settling at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1967.

The geographically-unbounded Boulding was also intellectually unbounded - perhaps a legacy of his early mentor and greatest influence, Frank Knight. His early work on opportunity cost, capital theory, international trade (collected in five massive volumes) and his 1941 textbook were exercises in mostly conventional economics - which earned him the prestigious J.B. Clark Medal of the AEA in 1949 (and the Presidency in 1968).

However, his 1944 paper and his 1950 book were attempts at reconstructing a balance-sheet approach to economics in an almost Post Keynesian vein. His work on fusing biology and economics in evolutionary economics (1970, 1978), were already intimated in his influential 1956 tract, The Image. He insisted on bringing in more aspects of economic behavior into economic life. Of his tripartite classification of economic activity - exchange, threat and grants - only the first he felt had been dealt with by economic theory (and even then, inadequately). The latter two, after much resistance, are only now being considered seriously in economics.

Boulding was a forceful advocate of normative economics - bringing ethical, religious and ecological concerns to bear on the analysis of desirable economic outcomes - and a ceaseless activist for the integration of the social sciences. Boulding was also something of a poet (see his sonnets, 1945), ethical and social philosopher (e.g. 1968) and, as his practical efforts demonstrate, a scholar of social conflict, war and peace (e.g. 1962, 1968, 1978, 1985). Verily, Boulding was a true squire of Knight indeed!